iTunes Match vs. Play Counts

i don’t know - soon find out later today. Why is it so hard to fix this bug? Its not essential but its annoying. Would like to see play counts updated in itunes for tracks played on my iphone or ipad. I only use these devices now, and i'm getting NO play counts checked. If I go into I tunes and look whats recently played - I see nothing! Unless I play a track on the PC, only then does it register the update.

This is still broken in iOS 6.1

I've spent this morning playing a Smart Playlist with iTunes Match on my iPhone 5 running 6.1 and the play count / date has not been updated via iCloud.

Plays on my PC (!!!) and Mac do update the play count /date

Annoying!

It may be too soon to say for sure that it's still broken in iOS 6.1

The way it worked under iOS 5 was that the "last played" dates wouldn't update immediately, instead it would happen in batches about a day later (roughly - there may have been some other trigger that just worked out to about once-a-day for me). So if Apple restored the iOS 5 behavior, you may still see the "last played" dates change later today.

And actually, that is the way it works with iOS 6.0 too, but it was only the play count that would update after a day or so. I have a whole bunch of tracks that show multiple plays, but no last played date - these are the songs I played on my iPhone, but never played on my computer:

And it does work for me.

After updating my iphone to iOS 6.1 this morning, the first thing I did was to play the second track highlighted in the screenshot below. Not even an hour later, and my iMac shows the correct "last played" date and time:

Good news that its working for someone Joseph.

Neither my play count nor my last played have updated yet.

I wonder if it updates only on wifi?

The iPhone is on 3G cellular with the itunes netbook on a different cellular network.

Hopefully the plays will sync over wifi later.

If this works for me ill be so happy, this is all iTunes Match is missing to me

It is now working for me too 🙂

No updating of the play count or last played in itunes on the mac when I got home after I had got home and the iphone had been in wifi for a couple of hours.

Tried backing up the phone to icloud then syncing to itunes - still no luck.

left the iphone and mac on for half an hour (next to each other) and "hey presto" the play counts from my iphone from this morning have appeared 🙂

This has left me with the question when do the play counts and last played update?

1. when iDevice is on wifi?
2. at a certain time?
3. or based on iTunes availability over wifi?

More testing to understand it but this is an improvement

Just worked for me. My macbook pro is on wifi at work, itunes open. I have my iphone 5 with ios 6.1 on same wifi. I started listening to my playlist "havent heard in 6 months" on my iphone. By the time the 3rd song came on my itunes was showing the first song as played today.

I like what I am seeing. I will see how it works on LTE on my drive home.

After seeing your positive responses I resubscribed and also found this working as well :)

also gave it a try with iOS 6.1 on my iPhone 5 this morning (German time), still (now it's 10:30 pm) iTunes on the iMac and the Apple TV are only showing the last songs played on the iMac more than a week ago :-(

Official reply I got for the bug I filed: Works as intended, last played times might take up to 24 hours to be propagated to other devices. Well, if it works at all, what I could not verify so far, why does it take that long?

Apple are you serious? What would you think if you would have to wait for iCloud synchronisation of document changes for 24 hours?? ***

It's great to hear that people are seeing improvement.

I still do not see data sync occuring like you are - so i'm deleting all match data and reestablishing a new "truth" for all information.

One question: For those who are seeing improvements, did you use the itunes Match beta before it went official release -- i'm wondering if theres something in our accounts that is keeping things from working correctly.

After re-establishing itunes match tracks from iTunes in the cloud, and re-listing the tracks on my iPhone 5, i believe i'm still not seeing play counts being updated or "last played date"

I updated my iPhone 4 last night to 6.1. It synced the playcount for the first track I played to my Macbook Pro but didn't sync the rest of my plays after that. Will the rest of the play counts show up later? Is anyone having similar results?

I could have sworn the first track updated, but when the others didn't I figured I was seeing things. Now that you had that happen, I believe that my first track updated.

Honestly, and I didn't think it would get to this point with me, but I too am abandoning iTunes Match. It doesn't seem like it would have been difficult for them to get it "right". All you have to do is ping the play and record the time (or the skip and the time). Why is Apple's system make no sense at all? Why is it so broken?

I gave up. I've moed to Spotify. Sure it costs over 4 times as much a year, but I'd rather be able to stream almost all my music, plus a bunch of music I don't even own myself, and get my plays to count on Last.FM. Spotify's app is also nicer in a lot of ways than Music.app, crashes less, and is clearer about how it works.

So... good job Apple, you dropped the ball.